Sandhya Suri's police thriller 'Santosh' selected as UK's Oscar entry

London: London-based filmmaker Sandhya Suri’s Uttar Pradesh-set police thriller “Santosh”, which premiered at the 77th Cannes Film Festival, was on Wednesday named as Britain’s Oscar entry in the international feature category.

“Santosh”, which includes Hindi dialogues, revolves around a newly widowed housewife as she inherits her late husband’s job as a police constable and becomes embroiled in the investigation of a young girl’s murder.

“BAFTA is pleased to confirm that Sandhya Suri’s film ‘Santosh’ is the UK selection for next year’s Oscars’ International Feature Film Award,” the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) said in a statement.

Members of BAFTA’s Selection Committee select the UK’s entry to be submitted to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) for the best international film category, which won Britain this year’s Oscar with “The Zone of Interest”.

“Santosh”, which is also in contention for the First Film Competition Sutherland Award at this year’s BFI London Film Festival (LFF) starting next month, has been hailed as a “deft thriller” and complex character study of a female cop, played by Shahana Goswami, whose moral conflict intertwines several themes of class, caste and intolerance.

“I’m not really somebody who wants to make a film because they want to teach somebody anything. I don’t have a particular campaign or things that I must tick off. So, I don’t like didactic films. But what was interesting to me was the idea of a type of place,” Suri told PTI in an interview.

“A type of place where these things are just in the DNA of the place. It was about the type of place where this misogyny, this casteism, religious intolerance, it’s just all sort of hanging in the air. It is just what that place is… it’s more an observation than a pushing through of messages, that these things can casually exist in society and to sort of hold a mirror up to that and to ask the question: if we put somebody like Santosh, who was a housewife, in a place like that, how does she process all that,” she said.

Suri, who is also the writer on the project, has drawn upon her own Indian heritage and documentary filmmaking expertise in shooting her first feature film in and around Lucknow over 44 days with the help of a talented local crew.

“I wanted to shoot in UP because I’m originally from there and also I wanted to film in a lot of live locations, that was very important for me to have that feeling of authenticity. I come from documentary and that makes me feel that I’m making something real,” she shared, reflecting upon all the background sound that the crew had to contend with amid ongoing local festivities.

“A director’s job is to choose their great crew. I had such a fantastic and experienced Indian crew who just knew how to take all of that in their stride. We left enough time for everything and everyone was very good at staying very cool in difficult situations,” she recalled.

Suri, who was born and raised in Darlington, north-east England, finds herself constantly drawn to India – a country her father loved dearly. After its London Film Festival outing and theatrical release in the UK, the filmmaker is excited about plans in the works for “Santosh” to be released in India.

“It’s been a struggle from the beginning of this quite complex film to have it work for both places. So, having it screened successfully in the UK and also in India are the sort of two most important things for me because I am a filmmaker from the UK with very strong links to India,” she said.